Shamp: PVRs give break from commercials

Posted: Sunday, October 13, 2002

By Scott ShampCommentary

I have a confession to make. I am in love. Absolutely smitten. I think about my new heartthrob all during the day. I rush to my new sweetheart as soon as I am free from all the other entanglements of my life.

But I know this love is wrong. This new love is a violation of everything I was taught.

Yes, I have TiVo love. Actually, I have a slightly different (and I think upgraded) version, ReplayTV love. PVR -- Personal Video Recorder. TiVo (http://www.tivo.com) and ReplayTV (http://www.replaytv.com) are really special purpose computers with mega hard-drives that you attach to your TV. Why? So you can record TV programs. Sure, you can do that with a VCR, but the computer in the PVR changes everything.

When I hooked my ReplayTV up, I also plugged it into a phone jack. Now, every night while I am dreaming about it, my ReplayTV thinks about me and downloads fresh TV schedules. So when I want to record a program, instead of having to punch in a start time, end time and channel into my VCR, I just bring up a program guide, highlight the program I want, and hit a button. That's it. And it gets even cooler. I can tell it to record all episodes of the program I want, and it will find them on all stations at all times. And I can search for a program by title (actor, genre, etc.) and it will locate it.

But you are only starting to see some of the wily charms of my new love. If a network shifts the program to a new time slot, my ReplayTV adjusts and records the program in the new time slot. And I don't even have to be at home to record the program -- I can log on to myReplayTV.com and use the Internet to tell my ReplayTV what to record. And TiVo takes the 'personal' part of PVR one step further by making a profile of what you record then using an artificial intelligence engine to suggest (and actually record) programs you might be interested in. Scary fun, right? But I haven't even told you the best (and worst) part of my new love affair. It is the guilty pleasure that I revel in. My ReplayTV shields me from commercials.

How does this work? Have you ever noticed that the screen fades to black between the TV program you are watching and the commercial? Federal guidelines require that TV producers fade to black between television programming and commercials. Well, my ReplayTV watches for that black and stops recording until it sees the black again. The result is I don't see the commercial.

Yes, that is a dangerous attraction of this vid fatale. I have been married to interstitial advertising all my life. Interstitial is the impressive sounding name for commercials that interrupt my viewing experience to plug products.

But now PVRs threaten to change everything. If too many people fall for PVRs, the television networks are doomed. Advertising is already hurting. PVRs could represent the straw that breaks the camel's back. TV as we know it won't survive if we all skip the commercials.

The good news for TV is that currently there are only about a million people with PVRs. The pricing model for existing PVRs includes a lifetime subscription fee of about $250 plus the approximately $400 for the machines. That is scaring a lot of people away. But the bad news is these devices have the highest customer satisfaction ratings researchers have ever seen.

So what is a conscientious geek like me supposed to do? Is it morally right to avoid the commercials? The networks have tried a strategy of suing ReplayTV to force commercials on us, but we know this won't work. And how can I tell advertisers that I tried my best not to watch commercials most of the time anyway? Is there such a thing as an evolutionary approach to technology? Can commercials see the asteroid that will make them extinct zooming in? Will the survival of the fittest guarantee that PVRs win out? Should we as consumers fight our own desires to prop up a version of television out of step with current technology?

I used to ponder those big questions during the commercial break -- now I just don't have the time. And my new baby beckons.

Scott A. Shamp, Ph.D., is director of the New Media Institute with the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism. E-mail: sshamp@uga.cc.uga.edu.